What I’m about to share includes some examples that embarrass me. I’d much rather be able to tell you that they all belong to my earliest years in leadership, when I was inexperienced and still finding my way. They don’t. Some happened when I’d been leading for years and should have known better. I’ve raised my voice when I shouldn’t have. I’ve allowed frustration with someone to affect the way I spoke to them. I’ve been so convinced that I was right about the issue that I failed to notice that I was wrong in the way I was handling it. I can’t change those moments, and I’m certainly not presenting myself as someone who now gets every difficult conversation right. But some of the leadership mistakes that embarrass me most are also the ones I remember most clearly. They’ve probably taught me more about how I want to use authority than the conversations I handled perfectly well.
Because being right can be dangerous in leadership. Not being right itself, obviously, but what we sometimes allow ourselves to do once we’re convinced that we are. Someone has ignored an instruction. They’ve made a serious mistake. They’ve behaved irresponsibly or failed to meet an expectation you thought was perfectly clear. Suddenly a sharper tone feels justified. An interruption feels acceptable because you already know the answer. A raised voice becomes firmness. A public correction becomes accountability. We become so focused on what the other person has done wrong that we stop noticing what we’re doing.
I had already seen what that could look like from the other side. Early in my career, I worked for a leader whose relationship with authority left a lasting impression on me, largely because I decided I wanted to lead differently. I can still remember being called in after appearing on a national television game show. While I was speaking to the host, I’d used the word “gobsmacked”. On my return to work, what I initially thought might be a friendly conversation about the experience became a severe reprimand about that one word and the supposed embarrassment it had caused the organisation. There had been no complaints. People who’d seen the programme were simply interested in what had happened. But the issue itself is almost beside the point. A leader was entitled to raise a concern if they genuinely had one. What stayed with me was the disproportion between the concern and the way authority was used to express it. There were other moments. On one occasion I left a meeting abruptly because an urgent situation had developed nearby and needed immediate attention. Afterwards, the discussion wasn’t primarily about what had happened or why I’d responded. I was reprimanded for leaving without first asking permission. I was still relatively junior, and the message was unmistakable: whatever the circumstances, I was expected to remember where the power sat. Experiences like that can teach you a great deal about leadership, although not always in the way the leader intends. I remember thinking that I wanted to do the opposite. The uncomfortable part is that knowing what poor leadership feels like doesn’t make us immune from practising it ourselves.
One incident from much later in my career still makes me uncomfortable. A clear decision had been made for a legitimate reason and communicated to a family. Later, the family arrived anyway with their young child, and a colleague allowed them to proceed. I was furious. I challenged the colleague there and then, in a public space, raising my voice in front of other people. I was the senior leader, physically larger, and visibly angry. The underlying decision hadn’t suddenly become unreasonable. I still believed it shouldn’t have been overridden. But I’d allowed the fact that I was right about the issue to become permission to be wrong in the way I handled it. I apologised soon afterwards. And as we talked, I also acknowledged the difficult position the family had put her in. They’d already been told no, but they’d arrived anyway with an excited young child. In that moment, she’d been left to decide whether to turn them away at the door. That didn’t mean I agreed with what she chose to do. It did mean I could understand more clearly how she’d ended up there. There were apologies on both sides, but the part that stayed with me was mine.
That may be one of the more dangerous moments in leadership: when being right starts to feel like a licence. Certainty can make self-examination seem unnecessary. Yet two things can be true at once. The other person can be wrong, and I can still handle their wrongdoing badly. I can maintain the decision, insist on the standard and apply an appropriate consequence while also acknowledging that my tone, timing, setting or behaviour fell below the standard I expect of myself. I learnt that lesson another time after reacting angrily to a potentially serious accident involving several colleagues. A child had picked up a large piece of wood and was trying to hit other children with it, only a metre or two away from where several adults were sitting. The situation could have ended with someone being seriously injured. There was a genuine issue to address, but one response frustrated me enormously: in effect, “I was on my lunch break.” I found that inexcusable. The incident was unfolding almost directly in front of them, and the idea that being on a break removed any responsibility to respond pushed one of my buttons very hard. I got angry and challenged the colleagues publicly. Looking back, the better sequence seems obvious: deal with the immediate risk, allow the emotion to settle, then address the conduct privately. Explain what happened. Ask the person to help you understand what they saw and why they responded as they did. Be clear about the seriousness. None of that requires pretending the issue was less important. It simply refuses to make legitimate anger an excuse for handling accountability badly.
That last point is harder than it sounds. It’s relatively easy to remain measured when someone immediately accepts your criticism. The greater test comes when they defend themselves, dispute your interpretation or refuse to offer the apology you think is due. If our respect disappears at precisely the moment another person stops complying, it was never much of a standard. It was a reward for making the conversation easy for us. Leadership sometimes requires us to narrow the discussion, become more direct or make clear that an issue cannot continue. “We’ve discussed this before. I don’t want us to be having this conversation again” can be a very firm message. Firmness, however, is carried by clarity and consequence. It doesn’t need extra volume.
Over time, I began preparing much more carefully for difficult conversations. I think about the words I want to use, the order in which things need to be said and what could reasonably be misunderstood. That preparation hasn’t made the conversations more artificial. Oddly, it’s made me more relaxed. When I know what I need to communicate, I’m less likely to stumble into an unintended phrase, introduce something important as an afterthought or allow frustration to write the message for me. Preparation also gives me room to listen. If someone paraphrases what they believe they’ve heard and I realise it isn’t what I meant, that’s useful information. Intent matters, but it doesn’t erase impact. A leader’s job isn’t finished merely because the words sounded clear inside the leader’s own head.
Sometimes preparation means designing safeguards around ourselves. I once had to be present in a formal conversation with someone who, I knew, was repeatedly saying things that were untrue. Dishonesty is one of the behaviours I find hardest to tolerate. Before the meeting, roles were agreed and I knew my job was to witness rather than conduct the conversation. So I sat there and listened, even when every instinct in me wanted to interrupt. Eventually the evidence was presented and the situation changed. Afterwards, the person asked to speak with me and apologised. I accepted the apology and explained how I felt about what had happened. The relationship didn’t magically become what it had been before, but the conversation remained calm. I don’t tell that story as evidence of exceptional self-control. The structure helped me. That’s the point. Good leadership doesn’t always mean trusting ourselves to behave perfectly under pressure. Sometimes it means knowing ourselves well enough to put guardrails in place.
There’s another dimension to those choices: the experience of the person with less power. There can be very good reasons to have another colleague, HR representative or witness present in a difficult meeting. Policy, fairness and protection matter. But the configuration of the room also communicates something. What feels like sensible protection to the leader can feel like being outnumbered to the person walking in. The setting, the invitation, who is present, where people sit and the first sentence can all influence whether someone experiences a conversation as an opportunity to explain or a judgement that has already been reached. Procedure shouldn’t be abandoned for comfort, but neither should we assume that procedure is psychologically neutral. I know what it’s like to walk into a meeting already expecting to be dismantled. In one role, after returning from two weeks of significant illness, I was called into a conversation about work that hadn’t been completed while I was away. What followed was a two-hour dressing-down about my reliability. Two hours. The detail I remember most clearly isn’t any individual criticism. It’s the feeling before the conversation properly began: I knew what kind of meeting I’d entered. There had been no meaningful check-in first, no attempt to understand before judgement arrived. That experience influenced a phrase I later came to use frequently in difficult conversations: “Help me understand.” Those words don’t remove accountability. They simply acknowledge the possibility that the leader may not yet possess the whole story.
Power makes that humility more important, not less. When we’re the most senior person in the room, silence can be dangerously easy to misread. Someone may nod because they agree with us. They may also nod because challenging us feels unsafe. They may leave a conversation looking composed and tell colleagues afterwards that they felt humiliated. They may comply with the immediate instruction while becoming much less willing to bring us bad news in future. This is why intimidation is such a poor substitute for authority. Even when it appears to produce the desired result, we don’t know what else it has taught. A leader can win the conversation and lose access to the truth.
People also learn from conversations that aren’t about them. I’ve watched a senior leader refer dismissively to a member of their own team across a room, reducing a colleague to “him” rather than using his name. It was a tiny choice of language, but power magnifies small behaviours. Everyone else in the room receives information from them. They learn who is afforded dignity, how mistakes are discussed and what might happen if they become the person who disappoints the leader next time. We often talk about culture as though it’s built through values statements and deliberate initiatives. A great deal of culture is built more quietly, through what people observe when someone with authority is irritated. This is also why charm shouldn’t be confused with respect. I’ve known leaders who could be warm, funny and exceptionally personable with clients or senior figures, then speak contemptuously about colleagues in private. Courtesy that rises and falls according to status isn’t really courtesy. It’s social calculation. If I had to choose one situation in which to judge the quality of a leader, I’d learn far more from watching how they speak to someone with less power who has disappointed them than from watching how they behave around the most powerful person in the room. People are often very good at managing upwards. Character becomes more visible when there’s little advantage in being gracious.
My own standard for this was shaped long before I held a leadership title. My father cared deeply about basic manners. Please. Thank you. Listen properly. He had little sayings that stayed with me, and one principle underneath many of them was that manners cost nothing. I still notice something as ordinary as how people behave at a door: whether they look behind them, notice the person approaching and hold it for a moment, or simply walk through as though nobody else exists. Holding a door open doesn’t make someone a good leader. But the instinct behind it interests me. Do you register the other person when there’s nothing in it for you? And does that instinct survive when you’re irritated, under pressure or holding more power than they do?
That’s where the idea of the person in the corner came from. Before a difficult conversation, I sometimes imagine someone I deeply respect sitting quietly in the room. For me, that person might be my father. Not because I need to impress him, and certainly not because I imagine he would expect me to avoid difficult messages. He represents a standard I would want my behaviour to withstand. Would I still be comfortable with the way I was speaking if he could hear the tone? Would I point, interrupt or use my physical presence differently? Would I be able to explain afterwards not only what decision I made, but how I treated the person while making it? The imagined observer isn’t there to make leadership softer. It’s there to make authority more conscious.
There’s a danger in taking that idea too far. Leadership can’t mean living permanently for an audience. I’ve held roles in which I became increasingly conscious that behaviour outside formal work could also be interpreted through the position I held. I became more selective about socialising with colleagues and more protective of boundaries. There’s a cost when self-awareness becomes constant self-surveillance. The goal can’t be immaculate behaviour twenty-four hours a day. Apart from being unrealistic, it would contradict another lesson I’ve had to learn: leaders get things wrong. The standard isn’t perfection. The standard is accountability. I was reminded of that in a difficult conversation when the other person became frustrated and I could feel myself following them. I began interrupting. My tone changed. Then I heard myself. I stopped the conversation and acknowledged that I was becoming emotional and wasn’t behaving in a way I considered professional. I apologised. The other person initially tried to reassure me that it was fine, but I didn’t want the apology diluted simply because they were being gracious. It wasn’t fine. I could own that without changing the decision we were discussing. The substantive position remained exactly where it had been. What changed was the temperature. We began listening again.
That experience altered the way I think about apologies from leaders. An apology is sometimes treated as a surrender of authority, as though acknowledging poor behaviour weakens the legitimacy of everything else we’ve said. It needn’t. There’s an important difference between apologising for the decision and apologising for how you conducted yourself while discussing it. “I was wrong to speak to you like that” doesn’t automatically mean “I was wrong to hold you accountable.” In fact, refusing to acknowledge the first because we’re convinced of the second is another way that power protects itself. The ability to correct ourselves in the room may be one of the clearest signs that we no longer need to perform authority.
Looking back, I think that was the biggest change in my own leadership. Early on, I sometimes felt I had to demonstrate that I was doing the job: noticing things, commenting on them, making my authority visible. Eventually I realised I didn’t need to keep proving why I was the leader. I needed to concentrate on doing the work. That didn’t make difficult conversations disappear. It didn’t make me endlessly patient, and it certainly didn’t make me incapable of getting things wrong. What changed was the burden I placed on authority. I no longer needed volume, constant oversight or the last word to reassure me that the position was mine. If anything, greater responsibility made the standard for my own behaviour higher. The more power I had in a conversation, the less comfortable I became with using that power carelessly.
Perhaps that’s the more useful way to think about leadership standards. They aren’t demonstrated when the conversation is easy, the other person agrees with us and everybody leaves happy. They become visible when we’re frustrated, when the evidence seems entirely on our side, when someone challenges our version of events, or when we could behave badly and probably get away with it. Courtesy is easy when it costs nothing emotionally. Respect becomes meaningful when we have to choose it while still saying no, setting a boundary, applying a consequence or admitting that our own behaviour has fallen short.
The person in the corner is only a device. Eventually, the hope is that we don’t need anyone there at all. Not a boss, not an audience, not a colleague waiting to challenge us. We know the standard we want to meet, and we hold ourselves to it because authority has made that responsibility greater, not smaller. And when we fail, as we sometimes will, we notice, we own it and we repair what we can. The question isn’t whether people can tell that we’re the leader. They usually can. The more revealing question is what they learn about us when we no longer need to prove it.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.